Zero-width character cleaner
Detect and strip invisible zero-width spaces, joiners, byte-order marks, bidirectional controls and soft hyphens from pasted text. Runs in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
About this tool
Zero-width character cleaner detects and strips invisible characters from
text — the ones that take up no visible width (or masquerade as an ordinary
space) yet still travel along when you copy and paste. They sneak in from web
pages, PDFs, Word documents, chat apps, spreadsheets and "watermarked" AI output,
and then quietly break search, diffing, == comparisons, code, CSV imports,
usernames and password fields.
Paste your text and the cleaner removes every invisible character it recognises, leaving the visible content untouched. Everything runs locally.
What it removes
- Zero-width characters (default on): zero-width space (U+200B), zero-width non-joiner (U+200C), zero-width joiner (U+200D), word joiner (U+2060), the invisible math operators (U+2061–U+2064), the Mongolian vowel separator (U+180E), and the byte-order mark / ZWNBSP (U+FEFF) — the classic invisible first character of a file.
- Bidirectional controls (default on): the invisible left-to-right and right-to-left marks, embeddings, overrides and isolates (U+061C, U+200E/U+200F, U+202A–U+202E, U+2066–U+2069). These can silently reorder how text is displayed and are the basis of the "Trojan Source" code-spoofing trick.
- Soft hyphens (default on): U+00AD, an invisible optional line-break hint that appears as a stray character when copied out of formatted documents.
- Non-breaking & unusual spaces (optional): turn on Replace non-breaking spaces to convert non-breaking spaces and other unusual Unicode spaces (U+00A0, U+2000–U+200A, U+202F, U+205F, U+3000, U+1680) into a normal ASCII space. The word gap is kept — only the odd space character is normalised.
Each removed character is deleted by default. Use the Replacement field to
substitute something visible (for example ? or [zwsp]) so you can see where
the invisible characters were.
Note on emoji
Modern emoji sequences (like 👨👩👧 or a flag) use the zero-width joiner (U+200D). Removing zero-width characters will split those into separate glyphs — turn Remove zero-width characters off if you need to preserve emoji sequences.
Privacy
Everything runs in your browser via WebAssembly — your text is never uploaded to a server. You can also run it from the gizza CLI or inside a gizza chat.
Common uses
- Clean text pasted from a website, PDF, or Word document before using it.
- Strip a leading byte-order mark (BOM) that breaks CSV, JSON, or code parsing.
- Remove invisible zero-width "watermark" characters some tools inject into text.
- Sanitize usernames, passwords, or search terms that silently fail to match.
- Detect Trojan-Source-style bidi overrides hiding in source code.
FAQ
Will cleaning break my emoji?
It can. Family, profession, and flag emoji are built from several glyphs joined with the zero-width joiner (U+200D), so removing zero-width characters splits 👨👩👧 into individual faces. Untick Remove zero-width characters when the text contains composed emoji you want to keep.
How can I see where the invisible characters were?
Put something visible in the Replacement field — e.g. ? or [zwsp]. Every deleted zero-width, bidi, or soft-hyphen character is then substituted with that marker instead of vanishing, which makes hidden watermarks easy to spot.
Does it remove the BOM at the start of a file?
Yes — U+FEFF (the byte-order mark, also known as the zero-width no-break space) is part of the default zero-width set, so a BOM that's breaking your CSV/JSON parser is stripped automatically.
Why is "Replace non-breaking spaces" off by default?
Because non-breaking spaces are often intentional (e.g. keeping "10 km" together). When you do enable it, U+00A0 and the other odd Unicode spaces (U+2000–U+200A, U+202F, U+205F, U+3000, U+1680) become a plain ASCII space — the word gap is preserved, never deleted.
Developer & Automation Access
Run it from the terminal
Same engine as this page, headless — via the gizza CLI:
gizza tool zero-width-cleaner "Paste text that may contain invisible zero-width characters here…"New to the CLI? Get gizza →
Open it by URL
Pre-fill and auto-run this tool with query parameters — the names match the API/CLI:
https://gizza.ai/tools/zero-width-cleaner/?text=Paste%20text%20that%20may%20contain%20invisible%20zero-width%20characters%20here%E2%80%A6&remove_zero_width=true&remove_bidi=true&remove_soft_hyphen=true&replace_nbsp=true&replacement=%28empty%20%3D%20delete%29Machine-readable descriptor: tool.json — title + parameters JSON Schema for agents.